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Infrastructure Update Intel

Stephen Sanderlin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:10:20 +0000

Update: Please see Christophe Fiessinger’s blog post concerning Known Issues with the Infrastructure Update

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Infrastructure Update Caveats for Cost Resources

Stephen Sanderlin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:28:58 +0000

While reviewing the white paper that describes the recent Project 2007 Infrastructure Update in detail, I came upon some interesting information at the end of the document.

Before I start, I first want to thank and congratulate Microsoft on a job well done with the quality and quantity of documentation they’ve provided for this update. Compared to the sometimes-cryptic KB Articles that typically accompany hotfixes and updates, the Infrastructure Update’s documentation is outstanding.

That being said, I do have some concerns relating to the changes in Cost Resources, which are a new way in Project 2007 of accounting for costs associated with a project. Cost Resources are typically used to account for non-work costs such as travel expenses. The Infrastructure Update makes some significant changes to the way that Cost Resources function, and while I am a big fan of the idea of Cost Resources, I cannot help but be concerned by some of the caveats I’ve quoted below:

Best practice use cases
There are still some known potential issues with the behavior of cost resources. In order to avoid any undesirable behavior, we strongly encourage users to follow the guidelines for using cost resource assignments.

Whenever possible, avoid assigning cost resources to tasks where there exists work and/or material resources assigned that may be updated in Project Server.

It is all right to plan costs at Monthly or within another summary time unit, but we strongly discourage users from making complex updates to cost resource assignment actual cost contours at that granularity.

Avoid using cost resources when the task or project has a 24-hour elapsed calendar associated. Costs spreading from one day to another can have unexpected results in this configuration.

Always pay attention to your cost values when editing in the “Usage” views. With user control of both cost and actual cost contours you are in the best position to make sure that the right costs are on the right days.

User scenarios to avoid
Now, with the infrastructure release, cost resources behave in a consistent and predictable manner. And above all, the scalar values (on the left side) and the time-phased sums (right side) of the “Usage” views show the same value for cost resource assignments.
There are, however, some situations we encourage users to avoid.

Try to minimize the number of times you need to “undo” changes to remaining duration on cost resource assignments. This will often lead to data inaccuracies for the time-phased side which further results in an inconsistency between the left and right sides of Project’s usage views.

If for some reason you need to disable the ability for Project to automatically calculate costs (this is a project options setting) your cost resource assignments will have their costs replaced with zeroes like all other costs within the project.

Tasks with cost resource assignments should not have any assignments on these tasks updated in Project Server either by the PWA User Interface or programmatically through the Project Server Interface (PSI).

Many of these items will not be a problem for most users — however, they could present significant problems in some organizations.

The first item that jumps out at me is item one in Best practice use cases. In this item, Microsoft recommends that users avoid assigning Cost Resources to tasks that currently or may in the future have Work or Material Resources also assigned to them. Depending on the reporting requirements for an organization and the way they’ve chosen to structure their project plans, this may present a problem. In simple terms, this restriction will prevent users from associating Cost Resources to a task in their project plan, meaning that it will be impossible to associate a travel expense or similar non-work cost with a task without relying on an external document or a PM’s knowledge.

Further compounding this concern is item three under User scenarios to avoid, which states that tasks with Cost Resources assigned to them should not have any assignments (meaning assignments to Cost, Material, or Work Resources) updated on that task through PWA or the PSI. This means that if you choose to disregard item one in Best practice use cases, you may only perform task updates from within Project Professional. However, it is possible to configure the system so that it will only accept Task Updates through PWA. This essentially eliminates Cost Resources as a tool for organizations who’ve chosen this configuration.

Furthermore, it would be helpful if Microsoft described precisely what happens should you choose to ignore item three under User scenarios to avoid. Does the PSI or PWA interface throw an error? Does the update appear successful but not take effect? Could you corrupt your entire plan? Could you inadvertently trigger Armageddon? Since users of the system invariably question why we make certain suggestions (for example, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been asked, “Why are special characters not allowed?”), not giving deployers any information (other than “because we said so”) means that we cannot communicate this to users. In addition, we are almost guaranteed that at least one user will perform the prohibited action, intentionally or otherwise. Depending on the results, we could burn a lot of money trying to chase down whatever issues subsequently arise without any clue as to their true cause.

The next item that jumps out at me is item three in Best practice use cases. Here, Microsoft recommends that users avoid using Cost Resources in tasks or projects where a 24-hour calendar is used. This is a very common scenario for users, and one that will essentially remove Cost Resources as a viable tool.

These concerns aren’t major issues, and deployers should be able to communicate them to their users clearly thanks to the plethora of documentation that Microsoft has provided for this release. In addition, even with these concerns, I think the Infrastructure Update holds a lot of promise. It looks like it will resolve a good number of the outstanding issues that users are experiencing, and makes some great improvements to the system’s infrastructure as well.

Let’s give a round of applause to Project and SharePoint Teams on a job well done!

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Advice when Posting to the Project Server Support Newsgroups

Stephen Sanderlin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:51:40 +0000

Gary Chefetz has made an interesting post over at ProjectServerHelp on how to write a great post when you look for help in the Microsoft communities newsgroups. He makes several interesting points:

Always include version information
If possible, always include specific error information (preferably a stack trace or direct copy from the event/ULS log
Include information about any troubleshooting performed to-date
Do not assume that similar error messages equate to similar problems, since software tends to use “catch-all” errors for many problems.

As someone who frequently answers questions in the newsgroups, I think that these are all very important. They cover some of the biggest timewasters in the newsgroups (for both users and experts alike). When posting, try to follow his advice — doing so should help cut down on the time-to-resolution for users seeking assistance in the newsgroups.

You can check out his post here.

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Project and Project Server 2007 Infrastructure Update

Stephen Sanderlin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:55:18 +0000

For those of you that haven’t heard yet, yesterday morning Microsoft released the long-awaited Infrastructure Update for WSS, the Office Servers (including Project Server), and Project 2007.

You can read an overview of updates here, and read detailed information in this white paper.

This update promises significant performance and stability improvements to the entire line of Office Servers, WSS, and the Project Client. If you haven’t already (or have only read the overview), I strongly recommend you read the white paper. It contains 30 pages of information about the update, and contains a lot of important information (including user scenarios to avoid).

From the overview:

Project Server

Timesheets and My Tasks stability and usability improvements

Queue Management user interface improvements

Logging Tracing improvements

Project Server performance improvements

Project Server 2003 to Project Server 2007 migration fixes

Database performance improvements to enhance the cube building process and Project Professional Save/Publish scenarios

Project Professional

Cost Resources calculation fixes

Improved Custom Fields stability

Improved local Project Cache stability

Fixed Excel Import problem

The updates can be downloaded from the links below:
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547) - x86
* The updates are applicable to all shipping languages.

Installation Instructions are available from the links below:
Deploy Software Updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Deploy Software Updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007 - This article also applies to Project Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express.
Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Office SharePoint Server 2007)
Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Search Server 2008)

Related Knowledge Base Articles are available from the links below:
Description of the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)
Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB953749)
Description of the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)
Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB953750)
Description of the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547)
Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB953751)

Please read and familiarize yourself with the installation instructions before you start.

As always, I recommend deploying this update to a development environment before putting it into production, just to make sure that nothing goes awry in your environment.

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“Internet Explorer cannot display the Web Page” error when signing in to SharePoint 3.0 using Windows Authentication

Stephen Sanderlin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:12:59 +0000

I recently encountered a situation where users attempting to login to a SharePoint 3.0 site when using the “Sign In” link were recieving an “Internet Explorer cannot display the Web Page” error. The Web Application was configured to allow Anonymous Access and to also use Integrated Windows Authentication.

No errors showed in either the Application or System logs. The IIS Logs displayed a 401 error:
2008-06-20 14:55:01 W3SVC96982807 ServerIP GET /_layouts/Authenticate.aspx Source=%2Fdefault%2Easpx 80 - ClientIP Mozilla/4.0+(BrowserIdentificationString) 401 1 0. Examination of the HTTP traffic with Fiddler showed the same 401.1 error.

Investigation of the Web Site’s properties in IIS showed that HTTP Keep-Alives were disabled — enabling them resolved the problem.

Integrated Windows Authentication (NTLM) requires HTTP Keep-Alives; this is because Microsoft’s NTLM for HTTP authenticates connections, not requests. This means that the HTTP connection must be kept open while the NTLM handshake completes. More technical information can be found here. There is no method that I know of to get around this limitation other than to not use NTLM.

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Infrastructure Update Intel

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